His early poetry was influenced by Marxism, surrealism, and existentialism, as well as religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism.

His later poetry dealt with love and eroticism, the nature of time, and Buddhism. He also wrote poetry about his other passion, modern painting, dedicating poems to the work of Balthus, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tàpies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roberto Matta.

Against totalitarism and Stalin, exposed the violations of human rights in communist regimes.

In 1914, Octavio Paz was born in Mexico City. His grandfather, (on his father`s side), was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Due to his grandfather`s copious library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings led by Emiliano Zapata.

From an early age, Paz began to write, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. When he returned to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well as a new literary sensibility. 

He travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1943 where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and publications organized by the surrealists. 

In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet`s life and work, as witnessed in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against the government`s bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz continued his work as an editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he published since 1976. In 1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.

Octavio Paz died in 1998.

Sources:

Nobel e-Museum